Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

He should have thought of that risk; he wondered if Simshad thought of it.

"I haven't heard of anybody," he said casually, "but if thelawyers asked me they might have asked somebody else before… You said a few weeks ago?"

"About a month, I think it was."

"I've got to get back to town," Maxim said, "but can I get you another drink?"

Brenner was willing; Scholz had to go into town himself. Maxim waited nervously while the woman brought one more Dunkeland Korn. Trying to change the subject, he asked: "And nobody did anything about the church? I mean rebuild it."

"It's still church land," Scholz said. "Nobody's stopping them building it up. But the pastor only came for one service every two weeks even then, in the war."

"It wasn't much good as a sanctuary, either," Brenner said with an odd cackle.

"It was a Sunday," Scholz explained. "April 15. The Bomber came down in the middle of morning service."

Outside, the sun lashed him across the forehead with a warning of another headache to come, and he wished he hadn't had a drink with lunch at Paderborn. No wonder plainclothes coppers ended up able to conduct surveillances from behind the cover of their own stomachs.

The easiest way to turn the car was to drive on up to the hardstand by the church, and as he swung about he realised it was in fact the old foundations of small cottages, completely gone with The Bomber. He, paused, working out that a shallow dent in the pasture was the remnant of a huge crater, and then got out to take another look at the marble. Seventeen names. Seven or eight had died in hospital, yes, and some of those would have lingered for a day or two; fair enough or evenblondgenug, as the Army usually put it. But the death certificates had shown thirteen people dying in Dornhausen itself. Thirteen plus seven or eight…

The woman came out of the inn and saw him, hesitated, then walked up. He waited.

"Did they tell you what you wanted to know?" she asked.

"I think so. Did you know Frau Schickert?"

"Yes. I was young at the time, a little girl. Sometimes I'd goin and she'd let me give the baby his bottle." A smile rippled across her wrinkled face and was gone. "A hussy from the city who peroxided her hair to look like a good Aryan."

"Did she?"

"I suppose so. It was something my mother said. To me, she just seemed kind. But sad. "

"What about?"

"Nobody was happy, that winter. The Americans were coming. I thought that must be a good thing. I didn't understand."

"Were you here when The Bomber came down?"

"Down in the cellar, getting some vegetables for lunch. The whole earth wentschunk and all the dust and bits fell out of the ceiling. I thought I was going to be buried. "

"Did you see her?-after she was hurt?"

She folded her arms and frowned briefly at the memory. "There was blood all over her shoulders. He -Herr Schick-ert – was holding a towel to her neck. Why do you want to know?"

"Some lawyer wanted to know where she was buried. I don't know why. But now I've got a photograph…"

She gave a little snort of laughter. "She isn't buried here. "

Maxim looked from her to the marble and back. "Not? -not there?"

"Not all the ones named are buried here, and some are here who aren't named. It's just a memorial, really."

"Some are buried here who aren't named?"

"Three Belgians, labourers. They were in the cottages." She nodded at the hardstand. "By the time they put this up, nobody could remember their names, and they didn't belong here, of course."

Death, the great leveller. Except in Dornhausen. But it explained the numbers that didn't add up – though not why Brigitte Schickertwas shown on her-certificate as having diedm Dornhausen when everybody seemed to know she had been taken to hospital.

"Do you know where sheis buried?"

"No. It isn't in the Evangelical cemetery, with the others who died in hospital. None of them came back, you see: the Americans couldn't spare the trucks and the farms weren't allowed to use their petrol for anything but getting food to market. Later, months later when I was taken into town for the first time since The Bomber, I wanted to put some flowers on her grave. I couldn't find it. Nobody seemed to know. They just said she didn't belong here really. "

For strangers, death in Dornhausen seemed to be oblivion of a peculiarly total sort.

He had half an hour left before meeting Sims, so he took a cup of coffee at thecaféwhere Mrs Howard had set up her last rendezvous, then walked her route along the great Gradierwerkin the park outside. He had never seen it or anything like it before: a solid wall of blackthorn twigs a good forty feet high, smeared in long rusty streaks by the gypsum and salt in the trickling water that had changed the wood into coral branches. The spa season was at its height and the park was full of elderly couples strolling or filling the benches, thecafétables and the chairs in front of the bandstand and staring down at their paunches from grey faces. It made Maxim feel not just young but uncomfortably young, and to walk at his usual pace would have been hooliganism. But the trimmed grass, the bright flowerbeds and the constant whisper of water from the wall and the many fountains gave, the park a sedate gaiety – and made it a very odd place to get shot. Two murders must have been the talk of the sanatorium for… well, it still would be. He began to feel too conspicuous and walked without pausing through the archway where Hochhauserand Mrs Howard had died.

The Korn was now clenching his forehead with an iron glove, and he was trying to doze it away while the orchestra on the bandstand played Rossini – at least it sounded like Rossini to him, though so did a lot of other composers – when Sims dropped onto the chair beside him. Maxim struggled awake.

"Good afternoon." Sims's smile flashed under the blue sunglasses. "Thank you for being punctual. Did you discover anything interesting?"

"Something, I think. How did you manage with the photographs?"

"I have them, but there is nothing of importance there.

Nothing I understand. Tell me your news."

"They remember the Schickerts, all right: glass eye, spoke English well, good at form-filling, had worked on the land before-that's Gustav, isn't it?"

Sims nodded.

"Well, the incident was a loaded bomber crashing there. They lost about twenty-three dead, but that includes three Belgians, who don't really count. But I think we've got the certificates for them. The odd thing is, the certificate for Brigittesaid she died there at 11.30, the time the bomber hit. But two people there remember her being taken into town -here – with a neck wound. Still alive. Along with about six others who died later."

Sims thought about that. "And who arranged about the certificates?"

"That's right: Our Gustav. Rainer. He went in with the wounded."

Sims took out his cigarettes, then glanced around. Other members of the audience were already glaring feebly at them. Sims stood up again. "Come. Tell me everything, carefully."

There was a monument to Bad Schwarzendorn's war dead of 1914-18 at the corner of the park closest to the shopping streets, and the two of them drifted inevitably towards it. Perhaps because they were talking about a memorial to another war, perhaps even more because a symbol of the dead young was more cheerful than the sight of the dying old.

"I walked round the Evangelical cemetery myself," Maxim finished up; "and I couldn't find any Brigitte Schickert. Not that that proves a thing. She could be planted anywhere. "

"It helps. It is strange that she is not there, with the others. It… suggests…"

"But if he was filling in the forms himself, why fill in something that can be proven wrong so easily? It took mejust one trip out to Dornhausen."